Essays From West of 98: Of Death and Tomatoes
Life, death, abundance, and reflections on gardening
We don’t contemplate death particularly well. I have written about this before. Polite society prefers to sanitize, obscure, and hide death from life, often refusing to accept that it exists. That allows us to avoid the emotions and deep existential questions associated with death.
If we reckon poorly with human death, then we are even worse contemplating animal death. Too many people fail to understand where and how their food is delivered to their table. We adopt euphemisms like “harvest” that obscure the reality of an animal’s death to produce meat. These are difficult topics, but rightly so. My friend Hadden Turner wrote this summer that contemplating death in nature is essential to living an abundant life. I agree. It is a question I have thought about frequently ever since he published those eloquent thoughts.
But what about the death of…plants?
It was this very topic on which I meditated on Sunday afternoon. The temperature had dropped into the upper 30s. It was spitting rain. An overnight freeze was coming, so we made a final harvest of our tomato and pepper plants before the freeze ended their growing season.
Thus, I set out into the cold rain and began to contemplate the death of tomato plants. Plants rarely inspire the same emotional reaction as animals in the average person. They are not as cuddly. Above that, tomato plants are annuals. They die at the end of the growing season, regardless. This is inevitable.
Growing tomatoes has been erratic at our house over the last five-plus years. We have tried various locations with subpar results from too few pollinators, too much shade, or not enough shade. This year, we tried two tomato plants in a flowerbed alongside the house. The ground was fresh, pollinators were nearby, and the location provided both morning sun and afternoon shade. These tomatoes went positively wild! Two small plants grew into one massive intertwined bush. It stood every bit of six feet tall and spread a solid ten feet from one end to the other. The plants suffered in the summer heat like the rest of us, but they spit off more tomatoes than our family could eat. On Sunday, we still had hundreds of unripened tomatoes that needed harvesting before the freeze. There was no good way to harvest them all without dismantling the tangled bush, branch by branch.
These tomato plants were at the end of their natural life. Even so, it was a touch emotional to physically cut them apart and shepherd them into that pending demise. They were good plants. They helped feed our family this summer and they will help feed us over the winter. Canned tomato sauce and salsa from the summer will soon be joined in our freezer and pantry by sauces, salsas, and more made with green tomatoes. We will even fry a few green tomatoes later this week. Those tomatoes were biologically designed to produce fruits that are edible for humans and boy did these particular plants do that work in 2023. They lived well. They finished their life with a flourish. On Sunday afternoon, they died well.
Their life is now gone, but their remnants will not go to waste. We piled up the branches to dry. We will soon burn them in a trench, cover the smoldering remnants with dirt, and create biochar, a natural soil additive used by farmers and gardeners across the world. That biochar will be added to next year’s garden. Just as the tomato plants nourished our family this year and just as they will nourish our family over the winter, next year they will nourish the next set of tomatoes. Hopefully those tomatoes will live just as abundantly as these tomatoes lived. And so on through the years, the cycle of life, death, and abundance will transpire through tomato plants.
Death conjures up a lot of uncomfortable feelings, but we must contemplate death as a natural part of the world around us. If we consider how the death of living creatures (like these tomato plants) affords abundance to other living creatures, then it will make us better as humans, citizens, and members of our local community. That community, whether we recognize it or not, lives together in death, in life, and hopefully, in abundance.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the Rural Church and State and West of 98 podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found.
It is a sad moment isn't it, James, when one has to rip up the tomato plants that have so faithfully provided for us (mine got blight this year so nature killed them for me!).
The sadness is intensified when one realises that it is back to the tasteless store-brought tomatoes for the winter. Nothing compares to homegrown heritage tomatoes in terms of taste.
Enjoyed this James. Thanks! I was just thinking about what to do with my now forlorn garden. I was going to throw it into the compost, but the biochar sounds like the move.